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I tried to lift my lashes, but they felt so heavy. I couldn’t keep them open no matter how hard I tried.
“Stay with me,” Oaklynn begged. “Don’t you dare—Damien…?Damien!”
40
OAKLYNN
“What…the hell?”
To my left, Keene snorted out an aggrieved grunt and fell back in his chair.
Glancing over, I watched him scowl and shake his head irritably at the muted television on the wall above the seating in the hospital’s waiting room. “How does healwaysget all the damn credit?”
I turned to look as well. My head felt heavy and drowsy, but when I focused on the screen, I was able to seeme, wearing nothing but Foster’s bloody T-shirt as he carried me from the front door of the university’s chemistry building.
The rest of the scene was flooded with red and blue lights as EMTs, firefighters, and police crowded the footage.
Below the scene, the news ticker read, “Star Quarterback Saves College Coed and Solves Ten-Year-Old Murder Mystery.”
“Oh geez,” Foster uttered in grimacing mortification from the other side of the room as he glanced up as well. “Really?”
“Wow, you certainly know how to steal the limelight, don’t you?” Parker accused teasingly.
“I didn’t… This isn’t…” Foster motioned speechlessly at the television, clearly wanting to deny it all, but Parker sniffed out an amused sound and bumped his arm into Foster’s.
“Dude, relax. I’m joking.”
Foster’s shoulders slumped inside the too-tight scrubs that the hospital had given him. To me, it only made his chest and shoulders look more defined and…superhero-ish.
I started to smile in amusement, only for the news report to show two stretchers being loaded into the back of a pair of ambulances.
Knowing one held Damien, and we still hadn’t heard back on how he was doing, I shuddered in worry, hoping he was okay.
Hudson who’d been sitting directly to my right with his arm securely latched around my shoulders tugged me closer to him in reassurance.
“He’s going to be okay,” he said.
But Hudson hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen the knife sticking from Damien’sbody. He hadn’t seen all the blood. He hadn’t watched the love of his life go completely lifeless and slump forward in a heavy heap.
Lifting my hand as if the move was becoming habitual already, I gently pressed my fingers to my sternum. Through the cloth of the scrubs I’d been given, I could feel the gauze and surgical tape that covered my own injury.
They’d slapped some glue on me, patched me back together, and given me a pathetic amount of medicine, then sent me on my way.
Professor Zweifel had gotten four inches of me sliced open before Foster and Damien had started pounding on the door and distracted him.
I could still remember the fear and utter panic when he’d started. I think my adrenaline had been pumping so hard and I’d been so scared about being tortured and killed slowly that I hadn’t really felt the laceration as much as I might’ve if I’d just accidentally cut myself. But I could feel a dull throb echoing through me now. I could feel all the pain, especially from the back of my head, where he’d initially bashed me unconscious.
My painkillers were definitely wearing off.
Except I didn’t want to take any more. I wanted to be awake and alert for when someone showed up to tell us how Damien was. The freaking concussion they said I had already made me feel groggy enough.
“Hey, can we turn the volume up?” Thane asked, pulling my attention back to the television.
Alec stood since he was the tallest, and he fiddled with the side of the screen for a moment until we heard, “Authorities aren’t yet releasing the name of the student who was attacked and saved from the basement of Crimper Hall on Haverick University campus earlier today, but the assailant has been identified as Professor Joshua Hughes Zweifel, a long-time chemistry instructor who’s notoriously known across campus as the test subject collector.”
Parker snorted. “The test subject collector? Who the fuck hasevercalled him that?”
“Shh…” Keene hissed, batting him quiet so he could hear the rest of the feature. “They’re going to mention me next. I just know it.”
